A few days ago, we heard about Microsoft planning to include Direct2D acceleration in the yet-to-come IE9, thus leveraging today's poweful GPUs to render web content.
Mozilla didn't fall behind: last Sunday, Firefox hacker Bas Schouten revealed a build of Firefox 3.7 with built-in Direct2D acceleration on his blog. His performance tests claim that popular sites like Facebook and Twitter render twice as fast compared to Firefox without Direct2D rendering. More complex sites do not see a lot of benefits, tough. This build requires DirectX 10 and a WDDM 1.0 compatible graphics drive, and thus, Windows Vista or 7. Download it here.

if I were MS, I'd keep any killer new IE features quiet until closer to the release, the firefox team are just gonna 1 up every time they announce something like this.

It's an overall win for Windows. While IE team may have liked to be first to release with a feature like D2D acceleration, the announcement/demonstration of such support has resulted in greater adoption of the new API. Hopefully, more devs will make the jump for similarly modern APIs where it makes sense for their apps.

It's an overall win for Windows. While IE team may have liked to be first to release with a feature like D2D acceleration, the announcement/demonstration of such support has resulted in greater adoption of the new API. Hopefully, more devs will make the jump for similarly modern APIs where it makes sense for their apps.

If Microsoft wishes for greater use of Direct2D/DirectWrite then they should start moving their common controls (and other widgets) across to using Direct2D/DirectWrite so that GDI's only function in the operating system is for backwards compatibility only with all parts of the operating system employing the new API. Until that happens developers are going to look at Microsoft, look at their underutilisation of Direct2D/DirectWrite and ask themselves "why even bother, Microsoft can't even be bothered utilising, why should we?"